It’s a slower week at Midtown Comics, but MJ, Michelle, and Sean have no trouble making their picks. See below!
MJ: Though I know I need to be reading Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Help me out here, Dark Horse, would ya? I need some digital action on this title. ETA: My apologies to Dark Horse, I’ve been informed they do have this on their iPad app—don’t know how I missed it!) my thoughts this week are all Dororo all the time. I fell in love with this title back when I was still scared to approach Tezuka and nothing could make me happier than to see it get an omnibus release. This is a fairly creepy, action-packed title, but what really drew me in is how freaking moving it is, which was absolutely not what I expected at the time. If you missed this title when it was first released, don’t miss it again. It’s a must-read for any manga fan.
MICHELLE: I’ll chime in to second the Dororo recommendation, and probably for similar reasons: most Tezuka available prior to Dororo daunted me with its Importance, but this shounen adventure story was completely approachable, and therefore a perfect introduction to Tezuka’s oeuvre. I’m happy to see it get a new release!
SEAN: Gosh, what could my pick be? Ahem. My pick this week is the 12th volume of Dark Horse’s horror manga The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service. As with most horror manga I read, there’s another reason besides ‘scares’, and that’s the cast. Everyone in this cast is appealing, even the characters with less depth, and they all have a great sense of humor, something needed when you are dealing with corpses all the time. That said, there are a lot of graphically unsettling images in this series as well. It’s not a wacky horror comedy, it’s a wry horror manga with occasional funny lines. As you may have gathered by the fact that it’s been 18 months since the last volume, this is not as best-selling as Gantz or Berserk. Let’s change that, it deserves more love.
Readers, what looks good to you this week?
CJ says
March 26, 2012 at 6:38 amI remember reading Dororo via the library (I do have the 3 single volumes, got them way before they went oop) and remembered looking at the back and reading something like “the basis for the PS2 game Blood Will Tell” and immediately went “oh sweet, I have a PS2 and I use it all the time” so yeah, I got that game. Sure, the game certainly has problems, like terrible platforming, having to play Dororo for any given amount of time, and terrible voice acting and the most empty villages ever created (except during cutscenes as needed), but man, the bosses are a ton of fun! And there’s actually 48 bosses in the game, most of them are hidden and you have to go back to the level after completing the main story in the chapter to find them. Very few of the bosses are recolors and even the recolors will attack differently in a different environment. But remember the monster with the lady tail in volume 1? You fight that! You fight all of the epic looking fights from the manga and then some! And it’s worth seeking out hidden bosses, they give you nice stat bonuses and stuff. And while the game doesn’t look particularly good, maybe acceptable for its time, but it does clever things like starting the game in black and white until you get an eye back from the first or second fiend you defeat then going to color. You can’t fight the final boss until you’ve beaten the other 47, and the side bosses usually aren’t as epic as the main story bosses, but the 48th fiend completes the story too, and the final one is pretty damn epic.
All in all, it’s definitely worth it for Tezuka fans as the story is top notch and actually gives an ending to the manga that it didn’t really have. Though you will go “wait, what?” when Hyakkimaru gets back body parts like his heart and liver, just roll with it.
Rij says
March 26, 2012 at 8:30 amThis is a no-brainer for me as I can’t think of anything that I’d pick over Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.
lovelyduckie says
March 26, 2012 at 2:02 pmI’m at least a week behind you all on when I get my pre-orders, for me it’d be the most Bunny Drop vol. 5. But as soon as Kurosagi Corpse Delivery arrives at my home…I’ll be dropping everything to read it.